1. Outside the United States the most attention to Rexroth has come
from Japan, because of the profound influence of its aesthetic and
religious culture on his work; next, France, because of the deep
influence of its aesthetic and political culture on his work. See the
Bibliography for translations of his work and commentary on it in
Japanese, French, and Italian.

2. Richard Ellmann and Robert O'Clair, ed., 14, 699-700, and
700-705.

3. The quotation from Powell appears on the cover of Rexroth's
Excerpts from a Life. Fiedler, 10. Carruth, 404. Woodcock,
"A Rexroth Retrospective," 23. Allen Ginsberg and Ted Berrigan
praised Rexroth in a short, unpublished and undated bio for the
American Academy of Arts and Letters.

4. Rexroth is called "Greatfather of American poetry" by Japan's
leading woman poet Kazuko Shiraishi (58); "America's greatest
living writer" by Brandeis professor Luis Ellicott Yglesias (110); and
"a man of love and learning" with a "voice like gravel down a
chute" in a poem by John Ciardi (172).

5. Bly goes on to say that "Snyder's early poems really are
mixtures of Rexroth's poems and the Chinese poets, just as my
Silence in the Snowy Fields is a union of Rexroth and some
twentieth century Spanish poets" (Talking All Morning, 23).

6. Snyder's letter was published in Kyoto Review 15 (Fall,
1982): 2. For more on how Snyder was influenced by Rexroth see
Bob Steuding, Gary Snyder, 19, 22, 45, 110-15, 119-24, 161,
and 167. Laughlin was interviewed by Robert Dana in American
Poetry Review (November-December, 1981): 25-26. Rexroth
told Brad Morrow that he had recommended to Laughlin publication
of Faulkner's Light in August and Sanctuary and
Isherwood's Berlin Stories and All the Conspirators.
"An Interview with Kenneth Rexroth," 48-67. In Lee Bartlett's
Introduction to his edition of Kenneth Rexroth and James
Laughlin: Selected Letters (1937-82) he informs us how
dependent the two men were on each other: "Rexroth suggested a
number of new writers to Laughlin (including Christopher
Isherwood, William Everson, Gary Snyder, and Denise Levertov)"
(xx), pressuring him in letter after letter to publish new work by these
and many other writers who were rebelliously visionary like himself.
Some of the more important were David Antin, Charles Bukowski,
Malcolm Cowley, Hilda Doolittle (H. D.), Robert Duncan (earlier
known as Robert Symmes), Richard Eberhart, Ralph Ellison,
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Ford Madox Ford, Allen Ginsberg, David
Gascoyne, Paul Goodman, Philip Lamantia, D. H. Lawrence,
Wyndham Lewis, Mina Low, Hugh MacDiarmid, Robert McAlmon,
Thomas Merton, Henry Miller, Pablo Neruda, Kenneth Patchen,
Herbert Read, Laura Riding, Jerome Rothenberg, Muriel Rukeyser,
D. S. Savage, Nathaniel Tarn, Dylan Thomas, William Carlos
Williams, and Yvor Winters (as poet, not critic).

Rexroth sometimes turned against those he had championed:
Allen Ginsberg for commercializing the Beats, Henry Miller because
he "thinks he thinks," Yvor Winters for his critical moralism and
formalism, for instance. And he relentlessly objected to W. H.
Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, Hart Crane, T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost,
Christopher Fry, Robert Graves, Ernest Hemingway, Robinson
Jeffers, James Joyce, Archibald McLeish, Mary McCarthy, Ezra
Pound (while highly praising Cathay and the Noh
translations), John Crowe Ransom, Theodore Roethke, Carl
Sandburg, Wallace Stevens (though he had admired his early poems),
Delmore Schwartz, Allen Tate, and Tennessee Williams, for
idiosyncratic reasons which are always interesting, if not always
persuasive. Rexroth's polemics are often delightful, even when his
critical judgments are less clear in his letters than in American
Poetry in the Twentieth Century and miscellaneous essays.
After his sometimes vicious demands periodically exploded
Laughlin's saintly patience, Rexroth acknowledged, "I wouldn't have
had a career without Laughlin..." (xx). Between battles that nearly
ended their friendship, it would always revive, thanks to idyllic skiing
expeditions in the mountains. Laughlin reminisced that conversations
with Rexroth were "so great, the high points of my life" (17
December 1981, 262) and contributed more than $40,000 for medical
bills during Rexroth's final incapacitation.

Even more informative than Bartlett's Introduction are his
voluminous notes, my favorite being two pages (138-39) on the
controversial New York performance by the Living Theater of
Rexroth's tragic tetralogy, Beyond the Mountains --in my
opinion his greatest work--in 1951. Rexroth mailed Julian Beck and
Judith Malina precise advice on staging, based on his extensive
knowledge of Greek and oriental drama. Besides epitomizing
Rexroth's philosophical poetry of integral personalism in the face of a
dehumanizing world, these eloquent plays reveal the depths of
Rexroth's character. It has always seemed to me that Rexroth
identified himself, and certainly his world view, with Hermaios Soter,
utopian king of the last free Greek city-state, in Afghanistan, who in
the third play denounces the barbarism of the Huns and the imperial
civilization of the Romans. After Rexroth gave up hope for a
humane, libertarian world revolution, he resembled Menander, the
last Greek philosopher-king who becomes a Buddhist before the
Huns destroy Bactria. These tragic heroes, and other characters
worshipping the goddess Artemis, identified in the plays with the
bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara, reflect the tragic fate of Rexroth
himself, a utopian driven by desire, love, and impossible ideals in a
warring world.

Certain passages in the letters, comparable to Rexroth's finest
essays, deserve to be reread for their scholarly illumination of poetry,
religion, philosophy, and history: on poetic principles (5 March 1941)
7 and prosody (April 1941) 11-14), Original Sin (April 1941) 15, the
rise and fall of humanist culture (Fall 1943) 35-36, non-European
literature (10 March 1955) 198-201, and Buddhism (5 October 1955)
212-13 and 215. Correspondence concerning Rexroth's anthology,
The New British Poets (78-79, 97-106, 126-28, 150-51),
plans for a New Directions Oriental Library (94-97), and a
description of Rexroth's anthology of American poets born after 1900
which was never published (24 July 1950) 150-52 are also extremely
instructive. And an eloquent letter to Laughlin from Father Alberto
Huerta, S. J., Rexroth's confessor, suggests the poet's spiritual depth
(16 June 1982) 263-66.

7. Linda Wagner wrote: "A new book, Kenneth Rexroth
(TUSAS 208), is also lively and perceptive. Morgan Gibson gives us
some sense of where Rexroth's aesthetic places him in the wide
continuum of modern poetry, emphasizing that for Rexroth the sense
of spoken voice, of poem as spoken communication, is primary.
Gibson also deals with Rexroth's 'visionary aesthetics,' his stance
that the poem has an active responsibility for all mankind's suffering
(and joy), and it is this part of Rexroth's belief that led to his
involvement in the San Francisco Renaissance, in its early stages."
(340). Edward Wagenknecht wrote of Rexroth, "It is certainly time
for him to have his day in court, and Gibson enters very high claims
for him." "4 American Writers."